How to Rank Local Website in Search Engines?

[korado11]

Hello,

I'm the owner of a rubbish removal company based in London - Frank Rubbish Removal and trying to optimize the website of the company for search engines. Until now, I have hired a couple marketing companies but without success. What I want to achieve is to rank for local keywords in the rubbish removal niche, for example, Rubbish Removal Chelsea, waste clearance Hackney, waste removal Harrow...and similar local keywords. I have spent a lot of money on marketing companies and the website still can't go on 1st page of search engines in the UK. Can you tell me what I can do or who can hire to bring my website on 1st page for the local keywords?

[MiriamEllis]

Hello Korado11,

As I understand your question, you are offering a service in a large city with several hundred districts, and you are hoping to rank for your service in multiple districts. There will be several facets to the advice I can give you about this.

1. If you are trying to rank in the organic results for these districts, your ability to do so will be based on a combination of domain authority, page authority, links, optimization, website content and user behavior.

2. If you are trying to rank in the local results for these terms, everything in #1 applies, plus other factors like reviews and citations, but you must also take into account the role user proximity plays in local rankings. If you are physically located in district A and your potential customer is located in district B, Google simply may not show you in the local results for that user, because they are not physically near your business at the time of search. Where competition is low or weak, it is sometimes possible for a business to rank locally in multiple districts of a large city, but if competition is stiff, it will be an uphill battle to overcome Google's extreme bias towards user proximity.

3. Whether you are hoping to rank organically or locally, your key here will be to do a competitive audit of the businesses outranking you to see how their metrics for each surmised ranking factor outweigh yours. You will tally this up with software or in a spreadsheet and this is what should set the strategy that you or any marketer you hire will enact so that your metrics can compete with and eventually surpass those of the businesses currently outranking you. *However, there may be some things you simply can't overcome, like user proximity. Where organic/local efforts fail, your alternatives are PPC, social and offline marketing to reach audiences you just can't access via SEO .

4. I would advise you to closely study the most recent Local Search Ranking Factors survey to see which factors expert local SEOs feel have most impact on local and localized-organic results. You will want to familiarize yourself with each factor, and most of them should be in your competitive audit process. I will also link you here to a post I wrote two years ago containing a spreadsheet for a competitive local business audit, but I want to mention that there are some new factors I'd be adding to that in 2019. Nevertheless, it will give you a good idea of what an audit should look like.

5. At the end of the above process, what you'd want to have is a list of tasks and goals, including a list of goals that aren't going to be achievable so that you don't waste time or money on pursing them with tactics that won't actually work. By studying the SERPs and your competitors, you should begin to have a strong sense of which districts you may be able to achieve a strong local and organic presence in, and which districts may be beyond the reach of SEO, making it more sensible for you to attempt to reach those desired audiences with PPC, social or offline outreach.

Hope this helps!